Review: Roll-Your-Own Rock in Guitar Hero World Tour

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Review: Roll-Your-Own Rock in Guitar Hero World Tour

With Guitar Hero World Tour, the popular music game finally adds drums and singing to the experience, bringing it up to speed with Rock Band. In an attempt to differentiate itself, it even lets players create and share their own tunes. But the user-created content isn't compelling enough to bring down the house.

Let's begin by calling a spade a spade: World Tour is, for all intents and purposes, a transparent attempt to keep up with the Joneses, the Joneses in this case being MTV Games' rival Rock Band.

Now, just like its closest competitor, World Tour allows four players to join in the band, drumming and singing along with the guitar slingers. Aside from the new song-sharing feature and a few other minor tweaks, World Tour feels exactly like Rock Band with a (partially) different set list. The user-generated music – hailed by some as the next big thing for videogames, and put to good use in titles like Spore and LittleBigPlanet – feels more like a gimmick in World Tour and less like a profound differentiating factor.

On the whole, I feel like I'm reviewing the same game for the third time. Music games may well be on the road to commoditization – but rocking out with your friends is still a winning formula.

(Guitar Hero World Tour is available for PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360. We played the 360 version.)

Guitar Hero's maker pooh-poohed drums and singing when the original Rock Band came out. "Personally, I think karaoke is lame," said a Red Octane vice president last year. "Drums, I don't know ... as a videogame I didn't really like it too much."

The company has, naturally, changed its tune after the wild success of the Rock Band formula, aping its design with World Tour.

For the most part, the designers have aped it well; the gameplay feels just the same, so Rock Band fans will want to pick this up for the new songs. Yes, some of the tracks, from hugely popular songs like "Livin' on aPrayer" to less obvious cuts like Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way,"are in both World Tour and Rock Band 2. But Activision's game has its own selection of exclusive hits from Michael Jackson, Wings, Jimi Hendrix and more.

One of the biggest appeals of Rock Band for me has been discovering, through playing them, that I really like certain songs that I otherwise wouldn't have bothered with. In World Tour, it's the live, unplugged version of Nirvana's "About a Girl" that's got me hooked. I also found out how much I enjoy playing guitar while singing "La Bamba," which I recommend you try if you own a microphone stand.

And speaking of discovering new music, that's the tantalizing appeal of World Tour's song-sharing feature, called "GH Tunes." Players can create music and upload it to Activision's servers, where anyone can download their work, meaning that Guitar Hero's track list is now basically infinite. But some fundamental issues keep this service from being entirely appealing.

First and foremost, you can't create songs with vocals. So the GH Tunes library is quite different in character from the real set list, as it's merely a collection of instrumental pieces. The fan-created tunes are often jarring to listen to, because they are collections of individual tones rather than a smooth, fluid recording. Activision is diligent at pulling down any and all re-creations of copyright-protected music, meaning you're dealing with original compositions, not the familiar tracks that made these games so immensely popular in the first place.

But I was pleased to discover at least one genre of music that fits in surprisingly well with all the limitations of the system: classic videogame music. The game songs are familiar – but Activision's music label partners won't be filing takedown notices. They're instrumental, too, and if they sound less like live tracks and more like computer-generated music, well, isn't that the point? So far, I've downloaded the theme songs to Castlevania, Super Mario and Bubble Bobble.

And what of the music creator itself? There are two distinct ways to make music – a "Recording Studio" that lets a group of players join together to jam and play live. Guitarists can assign different scales and chords to the buttons on their controllers, and thus play anything they want. But these jam sessions will almost certainly result in less-than-perfect tracks, so you can take them into the "GH Mix" mode (pictured above) to clean them up.

The process is fairly straightforward – I went into the recording studio and put together an amateurish melody, then took it into GH Mix and fixed up the messes with no problem after watching the tutorial videos. But that's about the limit of what I'd be able to do with the music creator, because it is, after all, just a tool. To create good music, you have to be a talented composer already, or be meticulous and patient enough to spend hours or days painstakingly transcribing an existing piece of music. I am neither.

All of this means that I don't believe user-generated content will have that profound an impact on the average Guitar Hero World Tour player's experience. But there's plenty more to the game. There are two new controllers that come with the full set, although you can use most other guitar and drum controllers, too.

The guitar feels great – the strum bar is larger, and I love the giant bar that you can slap with your palm to activate your Star Power meter when you need an extra point boost. There's a nifty-looking touchpad on the guitar's neck, but it's only used occasionally – in small parts of certain songs, you can slide your fingers up and down the touchpad to hit the notes. Much like using the smaller fret buttons that are located in the same place on the Rock Band guitar, this is not an easy thing to do without screwing up your rhythm.

I'm ambivalent on the new drum set: I can't tell whether it's simply less accurate or whether there's just a steep learning curve if you're already familiar with Rock Band's simpler setup. Certainly this is a very different animal. Adding two raised cymbals means you've now got to deal with drums at two different heights. It's also more confusing to play, because the straight line of notes on screen doesn't match up exactly with the arrangement of the inputs. And the kick pedal isn't tied to anything, which means it moves around a lot.

The drums also seem to drop my hits quite a bit, especially on the red pad. And occasionally, I could swear I was losing my combo count even when I wasn't missing any notes, meaning that the set could have been registering false inputs. I can't know any of these things for sure – I just know that playing the game with the Rock Band drums felt much more precise for me. That said, there is something about having raised cymbals that makes the experience a bit more like the real thing.

As for the game design itself, I should say that I truly admire developer Neversoft's style. Guitar Hero's graphic design and personality make Rock Band seem positively stoic. The game kicks off with a clever cartoon introduction, and there are plenty of goofy movie scenes and laugh-out-loud funny moments sprinkled throughout the game.

But that's the nicest thing I can say about World Tour's design. Whereas Rock Band 2 was defined mostly by the passel of tiny but significant interface improvements that made rocking out more painless, Guitar Hero seems stuck in the past. The song list is difficult to navigate. The single-player "career" modes are, for the most part, just a list of songs to play through, with none of the bells and whistles of Rock Band 2.

(On this: I understand that playing the drum line of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again," which is an endless three minutes of tapping out sixteenth notes until my arms hurt, is a realistic drumming experience, but it was so profoundly un-fun that it shouldn't have been anywhere near the drum career mode – let alone in the introductory stages.)

And whereas Rock Band 2 introduced a "No Fail" mode that let players rock out without worrying about having to "save" band members who lose their way, Guitar Hero takes a big step in the opposite direction – if one person fails, the song ends instantly.

Guitar Hero World Tour gets all the big stuff right. If you're a fan of Rock Band and like the set list, you'll want to have this. If you think playing instrumental music composed by fans (or ganked from 8-bit videogames) sounds interesting, that's another reason. But comparing the two games – and how could I not – World Tour loses by a hair.

WIRED Ambitious new song-creation mode, more elaborate drums, some great music, available first on Wii/PS2*

*Note: One other thing that escapes the scope of this review, but needed to be said: Activision deserves praise for shipping every version of this game on the same day, while Wii and PlayStation 2 owners, as of this writing, are still waiting around for Rock Band 2.